BTM63 Transcription

Welcome to Episode 63 of Behind The Mission, a show that sparks conversations with PsychArmor trusted partners and educational experts. 

My name is Duane France, and each week I'll be having conversations with podcast guests that will equip you with tools and resources to effectively engage with and support military service members, Veterans and their families. Find the show on all the podcast players by going to www.psycharmor.org/podcast.

Thanks again for joining us on Behind The Mission. Our work and mission are supported by generous partnerships and sponsors, who also believe that education changes lives. This episode is brought to you by PsychArmor, the premier education and learning ecosystem, specializing in military cultural content. PsychArmor offers an online e-learning laboratory that's free to individual learners as well as custom training options for organizations. You can find more PsychArmor at www.psycharmor.org. 

On this episode of Behind the Mission, we feature a conversation with Ken Davenport about Mission Edge, a social enterprise providing consulting and strategy services to nonprofits and social impact organizations. We talk about his work in supporting veterans transitioning to post-military careers as well as his experience as a published author.

DUANE: So Ken, you seem to be a serial entrepreneur and experienced executive, specifically founding several companies at the intersection of technology, healthcare and data analytics. However, in addition to a wide range of other interests, we'll get to that in a minute, you also spend your time supporting service members, Veterans, and their families. How did you go from startups to supporting the military affiliated populations?

KEN: Yeah, thanks Duane. Thanks for having me. You know, it was kind of an interesting story. 10 years ago now. I can reflect back and it looks like it has a definite pattern to it, but I don't think I had it all planned out at the time that I had started. Really I had left the last company that I started in 2010 and had a little bit of what I'd like to call kind of the obituary moment where I thought about it. I was actually reading an obituary in the Wall Street Journal of a very accomplished World War II Veteran, and was thinking about what a life that guy lived. And I thought to myself, what's my obituary going to say, when I die and am I going to be proud of kind of the legacy that I left. At that time, I'd been in the business world for 20, some odd years. And  I'd done well, but I hadn't really left a mark that I could feel proud about. And so I quit my company and started volunteering. One of the volunteer opportunities I had was with the Armed Services YMCA at Camp Pendleton. And I became friendly with one of the board members and was just giving the board some help on fundraising and just stuff that I had done in the private sector.

And I fell in love with the Marines on the base, and I fell in love with the struggles that a lot of these young Marine families particularly were having at the time, 2010 and 2011. I just said, “Look, I got this is what I have to do now. At least for a part of my life, the next 20 years, I've got to give back to this community, which is served us so well and where the burden has been so heavy. And I just started doing what I could. And then I started realizing that, “Hey my business career has a lot of interesting nuggets of data for transitioning Veterans that could be useful.” And I had a pretty big network and I was able to make introductions for people and I just started kind of meeting with folks one-on-one wherever I could. And, I joined the Board of the Travis Manion Foundation when they came to San Diego, and was doing transition work with them. And so I don't know, it just grew into a passion project of mine. I think it's been useful for Veterans to have a little bit of a civilian perspective on the transition processes. I think they hear a lot from other Veterans who proceeded them into the civilian world, but as someone who's hired a lot of people and who has a lot of corporate contacts and really understands a little bit about how corporations think, I feel like I had some value to add there. And so that's kind of how that got started.

DUANE: I think there's a huge benefit also in the fact that you've gone out of your way to learn military and Veteran culture, right? You're not trying to change Marines into corporate business people right away. You've taken the time to understand. That puts me in mind of after I finished my clinical degree, I stayed at the school and I was talking to the Dean of the MBA program that I was starting. And I explained to her that I was in The Army for 22 years and she told me, “Oh, you're going to learn so much about leadership in this. And she was like it's totally nothing like the military,” but she didn't have any, she didn't know what military leader did. We joke about it now. But it was this misunderstanding from her point of view that military leadership was all about barking orders and things like that. But you've really seen that from the corporate culture, but also taking the time to understand military culture and how those two things overlap.

KEN: Yeah. I think one of the primary kinds of lessons that I try to leave with the Veterans that I mentor in this area is: culture is more important than anything else when you transition. And it's more important than position. It's more important than the title. It's more important than money because if you get to a culture that values your service and really understand what you have to offer, you're going to climb that corporate ladder inside that organization. And you don't have to start at the top. You can start, even in the mid levels and you will have a very fine career in a career that you really enjoy because you'll be working in a place that values who you are. And, really, respects your service and doesn't see it as some different world that has no connection to the work that the company is doing. And so the best companies that I've connected Veterans to are ones who really get “Hey, I can teach people technology.” A good story as I connected a Marine Infantry Officer friend of mine with Cox Communications here locally. And, he looked at me like I had three eyes when I brought it up to him because he was in the Defense Industry. He wanted to move to the commercial side. And he said, “I don't care at all. I don't know cables, who wants cable, like everyone's trying to cut their cable. What are you talking about?”

And I said, “Look, just meet this guy. This guy is the VP of Field Ops. He's a former Marine. He's looking for people who know how to lead people, build things and you know how to do that. You don't know anything about cable, but  he's looking for people who can lead others and sure enough, he's gotten three promotions since he joined and is happy as a clam. But I just knew that the best companies are looking for leaders and the military is full of really good leaders.

DUANE: And I think that's the benefit of, as you mentioned, coming from the sector, approaching this military transition space employment, but obviously more than employment, it's supporting military service members as they're transitioning. You're stepping out of that civilian side of the divide and you're stepping out into the middle of no man's land.

And you're trying to say to Veterans, “Hey, it's not scary over here. You do have a lot more to offer. You're almost like a navigator, a translator. Again, taking time to understand those who served, but you know, the business community really, really well. And I think that's a really important aspect that a lot of transition programs are missing is people from the business community stepping into that.

KEN: Yeah. And I think that for me, I approached it with a lot of humility and just, I wanted to learn about who these people are and what they really want and what kind of makes them tick. And then trying to figure out how to connect them with something that is not just a job that is a new career for them and something that they can really sink their teeth into.

And I think that for me, you know, I came at this later in life but I have a lot of envy  of the fact that, when you're in the military, you have a purpose bigger than yourself. And that is something that civilians, I think need more of. It's very hard to find. And so I have a lot of envy or a lot of respect for the fact that there's a great value in putting on the uniform and being a part of something where you're not thinking about yourself every day. And I think the best transitions are the ones that match that sense of, “I'm leaving service, I'm taking off the uniform,” but I'm going to a company where, there's a purpose here. And I can do something that is meaningful on a day-to-day basis and not just sit in the cube and write code or talk on the phone. Some people may be into that, but I think most of the Veterans I've talked to,  really want to do something with some purpose in their next career. 

DUANE: One of the challenges with the military is, you're right. Everything contains both. The thing that you're doing, the job that pays the bills is also something that's very meaningful and satisfying. But no matter how long we're in, whether it's two years or 20 years, you still have to leave at some point, like that has to end. And if we were, for example, working in the social sector, you would be able to do that for a 30, 40 year career or so on until you retire. And so I think that's one thing for a lot of Veterans. I like how you say that the culture is important, this meaning and purpose is important. When we get out, we're told, “Your position is important, your paycheck isn't like the tangible or the transactional pieces are the most important, but that's counterintuitive to how people serve.” 

KEN: Honestly, in the a hundred and some odd Veterans that I've personally worked with and seen in the transition, I think the ones that took the money or took the big job, they never ended up. Very few of them are still in those positions. They just didn't feel like the money was worth the sacrifice they had to make in terms of the quality of their job or the respect they were getting inside or any of those kinds of things that would give you purpose on a day-to-day basis.

And so, it's a little bit of a shame, but I think if you follow your passion and a little bit of your heart, you'll find the right path. And it may not be the first job. It probably isn't the first job right out of the military. You're gonna have some trial and error in the same way that anybody, any civilian going in the military is going to have a lot of trial and error.

I mean, it's a different animal in some ways. So, I do think that the most successful transitions are the ones where you're looking for the best fit for you holistically. It's not just about a job title or salary. It's about the company. It's about your boss. It's about leadership. It's about their values. And those are the things that really, I think, matter the most.

DUANE: And I get the sense from what I know of your work, it's also about a wide range of interests. You talked a little bit, obviously as you come in and your success in the corporate sector. But you're also a published author, which is you know, I'm sure people say, well, how do you have time to do all this stuff?

As a writer myself, I'm always interested in talking to authors about their work. And there are a number of Veterans and military family members who feel like they have stories inside of them. If you're working in the social military sports space, isn't enough. I like to hear more about the two books that you've published.

KEN: Yeah. I've always been a writer at some level. I've written a lot professionally, but I always wanted to try my hand at writing novels. And, I had  a story inside of me for years that I had been thinking about that was an alternative history of the 1960s, Vietnam and John F. Kennedy. I had done some work when I was in graduate school, on the Vietnam war. And I had this kernel of an idea about a book that, you know, what if Kennedy had lived in, what would that have done to the war in Vietnam? And, I wrote 80 pages of it about 15 years ago, and lost track, lost my steam and put it aside.

And another friend of mine who had just gotten his first book published. I went up and met with him and he said, “You should pull that out and just finish it. Just finish it. You don't even have to do anything with it, but don't leave it half written or a quarter written, just go back to it and see what you can do with it.”

So I did and I ended up finishing it. And then I wrote a second book, which was in a completely different genre, a techno thriller. Based on a friend of mine's brother who works for the Department of Homeland Security as a bug hunter at Chicago O'Hare airport. And he looks for bugs in cargo that come in from abroad that are a threat to our crops and stuff. And I just got this idea of doing kind of a science fiction spin on that set in the future. They don't really follow any pattern. It's just stuff that I've been interested in. And I really enjoyed it and I've been halfway through the sequel of one of the books for a little bit longer than I'd like to admit. And I don't know if that is ever going to get finished or not, but I still have some more writing in me, I think, to go. 

DUANE: Have you ever talked to some Veterans who may be interested in publishing and not just memoirs. I don't want to say it's easy to write our own stories. I got a very good friend who had just picked up a publishing deal, for a fiction book that she wrote and so have you supported Veterans if they're trying to, they're thinking that's something they want to try to do in their post-military life is access that creative side?

KEN: Yeah. And we've talked a little bit about the process. You know, I ended up self publishing through Amazon, which I think is a powerful tool for people. The publishing industry is increasingly narrow and I don't know that there are tremendous value in being signed to a publishing house versus self-publishing at this point. Most of the publishing houses don't put a lot of money into marketing anymore. So you're marketing your own work anyway, no matter who's publishing it. But I decided to do self publishing and I've talked to a number of Veterans who were working on a transition book, but also a novel and just gave them as much information as I could about some of the tips that I would give them around how to self publish in a way where you can't really tell the difference between the self published book and the professionally published book. And you can do that if you invest in the right places, you have a great editor, you have a great book designer, book cover designer, and you do it in a way that  really looks not like a homegrown project, but looks like something that any one of the major publishing houses would put out. And with technology in this day and age, you can certainly.

DUANE: No, I absolutely agree. I probably have three or four books. I've got some of those trunk books. We call them those that are sitting in the trunk there, but I've self-published a collection myself, but I have gone through and worked with the publishing house and it was a little more difficult. Ultimately, it got to the point that said, we love what you're writing and we love what you're doing but nobody knows about you. So we're not gonna move forward. 

KEN: A friend of mine told me who's a published author who's been, who's done the self publishing route and the traditional published route basically said the number of authors that actually make a good living on writing is very small. And it's all the names that you would know, which tells you just how small it really is. And then there's a lot of writers who squeak by, but they're always struggling to get their next sort of novel out and try to hit that home run. Then everybody else is not really making any money. So, it really can't be about the money. It's more about do you have something to say that you want to get out there and it will find its own audience.

You have to push it, you know, if you want it to sell, you have to market it yourself. You have to use social media. But those are things that you would have to do with a traditional publisher anyways. So, the beauty of the self publishing route is it gives you a hundred percent control over the rights to it, and the royalties are higher. I think it's a great democratization of the creative process. It takes control away from New York publishing houses about telling you what, what should get published and what shouldn't. And I think in this day and age, my attitude is what do you guys know?

Let the market decide, let people put their stuff out there and let's see what happens. 

DUANE: And I think that idea, and we’ve talk about, we have stories inside of us. Everybody has a story inside of them. Another thing, and one of the primary roles that you're in now is co-founder and CEO of Mission Edge, which is an organization that supports nonprofits and social enterprise organizations, is you provide the kind of infrastructure that frankly, many nonprofits aren't all that good at, and allow them to focus on what they are good at, which is their particular mission.

KEN: Correct. So this was born out of my volunteer work in 2012. We started Mission Edge as a nonprofit to help other nonprofits. The premise was that a lot of organizations were doing great work in the community, including the Veterans space with the back office, support operations, getting, decent financial reports, hiring and firing people the right way. Having benefits and just doing a lot of the nuts and bolts business stuff that I think as a business guy, you take for granted like, well, everyone does that, but you know, nonprofits are undercapitalized operationally. And so they tend to scrimp there. 

So we came up with a consulting model that said if I can outsource good accountants and CFOs to nonprofits and I can spread them out over multiple organizations where I can hire really good people and that, I can price it at a cost that nonprofits can afford. So that's how we got started. And since then, we've been doing a lot around teaching non-profits earned revenue strategies, trying to get them off the dependency on grants and donations, which is a very difficult way to run an organization. 

One of our clients is PsychArmor as a matter of fact, which it has been very active in this space, obviously in this podcast and we've been working with them on a variety of different fronts to try to create a sustainable business model for the organization. And one of the big assumptions around that is that you don't have to be a nonprofit or act like a nonprofit to do good work in the social sector. And it's true, there are many different ways of having social impact. You can be a very good, solid thriving business, and still have a really good social impact. So it's not just for nonprofits anymore.

And I think that's a message we're promoting a lot because I think that in order for us to solve a lot of these larger problems, you need the power of the market and you need sustainable, scalable business models or to solve these problems. If you leave it up to the government and the nonprofit sector, we're never going to get scale any of these things. 

DUANE: No, I absolutely agree. I've always felt having worked in nonprofits, for a number of years, started out in the post-military. My first job was in a nonprofit. Then I went to clinical work and found myself back in the nonprofit space. Like you said, because there's a lot of good social work and social will, that needs to be done there.

But I like the idea of taking business practices like you said, a business, especially a startup will outsource their marketing. They will outsource their finance. They'll outsource their accounting and that's typical business practice, but nonprofits try to do everything in house, on a shoestring budget. And people aren't trained that way. 

But then you also take that idea of social support and social efforts and improving social capital and bringing that to the business community, and creating social enterprises. They're not nonprofits, but they still create positive social impact in the community. 

KEN: Yeah. And I talked to Veterans a lot about this actually. Veterans come wanting to have a social impact, wanting to start a nonprofit. Often, sometimes it's a business with a social purpose, and this is a very often where the conversation kind of goes. And I think that this is really the future.

One of the good things that's happening is there's a generational shift going on. Young folks, millennials, and even those are younger are not thinking about starting nonprofits. The nonprofit concept is something that will always be with us, but I think the energy in the social innovation space is around social enterprise. A lot of the young people that are coming out of universities who are starting these organizations are thinking about building businesses. They're not thinking about building a nonprofit and then going begging for dollars. That's just not the way their minds work. And thank goodness for that because I do think that this is the only way we're going to make real progress is to unleash the market, in some way that can help to drive these organizations forward and really solve some of the problems that we're looking at. I think the Veteran space is a good example. There are a number of Veteran non-profits that are working to earn revenue models and have business lines that are not just grants and donations anymore. And I think it's really, I think it's really helping them to scale.

DUANE: No, I think we're at a critical point in time having just ended the global war on terror. Obviously, as we record this we're facing other different global threats with what's happening in Ukraine, of course. But you have an entire generation of Veterans who have the potential to be this century's greatest generation,with the size, and really the reach, but then also a new way of doing things. And I really appreciate that Mission Edge and you obviously are really involved in having those conversations. So if people wanted to find out more about the work that you're doing, Mission Edge, or some of your other projects; how could they do that?

KEN: So www.missionedge.org  is our website and you can check it out. You can contact me through it. My email ken@missionedge.org. My books are on Amazon. If you look them up, if you're interested we're always looking for support, whatever type, even just having a conversation about ideas.

If there are Veterans who are listening to this who are interested in starting a business, please reach out to me. I'd love to talk to you about your entrepreneurial aspirations. And I'll be more than happy to help connect you where I can. And, that's a passion of mine and there are a lot of very good budding veteran entrepreneurs out there. I've just had a phone call today with a new Veteran venture fund that has started up in the bay area to fund Veterans startups at the Nexus of AI and cybersecurity. So, there's a whole world offering a world out there that you guys can really get into. And if I can help do that, I'm more than happy to.

DUANE:Oh, that's great. I'm going to make sure that all of those, as well as your contact information is in the show notes. Thanks for coming on the show today.

KEN: Thanks a lot. Dwayne's great. Great talking to you.